Wolf Weber (Darmstadt)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Darmstadt - Excerpt from the Topographia Hassiae by Matthäus Merian 1655

Wolf Weber (* approx. 1572; † probably on August 29, 1582 in Darmstadt ) was the youngest and only male victim of the Darmstadt witch hunts under Landgrave Georg I of Hesse-Darmstadt .

prehistory

Wolf Weber was the youngest son of a woman known only as an old weaver . This had apparently helped her daughter Sara and her lover Konrad Ballaß to poison their respective spouses. As a result of this double murder, the old weaver and her daughter Sara were accused and convicted of witches. The old weaver was soon cremated with several other women convicted as "witches" while Sara's execution was postponed because she was pregnant.

Due to the witch hunts and interrogations, however, the prison cells were so busy that Sara was initially guarded at home and then was apparently chained unguarded in the rooms of one of the city gates. Her brother Wolf then brought her a file with which she could free herself and escape. After the escape was noticed, Wolf was immediately suspected, which is why he was arrested and interrogated. Sara was to be picked up again the next day in the near Bessungen . Her further fate is unknown, but it can be assumed that she is among the other victims of the witch hunts.

Wolf's interrogation

In Wolf's interrogation, his escape assistance and the apparently not yet fully clarified murder of Sara's husband and Konrad Balla's wife played only a very subordinate role. Rather, the interests of the authorities focused on the testimony of some girls in town who said of Wolf that he had claimed to have seen the granddaughter of a "witch" who was executed with his mother marry the devil.

Wolf initially denied this, but after a few blows of the stick admitted not only his "observation", but also that he himself had been taken to the devil by his mother. He then expanded a collection of widely used narrative motifs of devil dances. His mother led him to a little "black boy" who turned out to be a devil by the name of Fedderwisch and who explained to him that Wolf was now his servant.

During one of these dances, Wolf wanted to have seen a buck-legged man who had four feet but still walked upright, being married by a long black priest in a black coat to the granddaughter of a "witch" who had been executed with his mother.

Landgrave Georg I.

Aftermath of the interrogation

That girl, Anne from Dreieich (* approx. 1565, † probably on August 29, 1582), was the granddaughter of a woman known only as the Dreieicherin , who was executed together with Wolf's mother. In addition to Wolf's confession, another woman accused of being a "witch" also accused Anne of having married the devil. This woman, a Lenhardin , added a sexual component to the allegations against Anne, which was to play the central role in Anne's subsequent confession.

Anne made this confession under the threat of torture without actually being tortured. She also used well-known narrative motifs from witch dances, here with a focus on sexual intercourse with the devil.

The legal question

Landgrave Georg I had doubts whether he could have Wolf and Anne executed. However, he never doubted her confession for a second, he was only concerned with the legal question of whether he could punish minors in the same way as adults.

He corresponded with his brother Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hessen-Kassel on this question for weeks . This tried to have a moderating effect on him and to convince him that many confessions of witchcraft were pipe dreams. Since Georg I was not concerned with this question at all, he did not follow Wilhelm's arguments.

execution

Probably on August 29, 1582 (but in any case in late summer 1582) Landgrave Georg Wolf and Anne executed together with 8 other "witches". He did not clarify the legal question as such, but as the sovereign he took out the right to "make an example".

consequences

In 1586 there was another wave of persecution in Darmstadt, in which 17 women were executed, and in 1590 two more victims can be identified. The witch persecutions seem to be closely connected to the person of Landgrave Georg I, because on the one hand at the same time in the rest of Hesse the "witches" were at most a marginal phenomenon, which one was very skeptical of, and on the other hand Georg's successor himself during the height of the Witch hunts in the 17th century renounced witch executions.

Reception history

The Darmstadt witch hunts had not been researched in detail for a long time. Only the court record of a case in Arheilgen (now part of Darmstadt) was examined in more detail from 1915.

The case of Wolf Weber and the closely related case of Anne from Dreieich were first mentioned in 1966 in a biography of George I. The correspondence between George I and Wilhelm IV of Hessen-Kassel, preserved in copy, had been unknown to researchers up to now.

In two series published shortly afterwards in the local press, the case was then reported with lurid indignation, in which, among other things, the completely anachronistic talk was of a "police state with a Christian character" and which finally culminated in the claim that Anne was a species from her grandmother "Callgirl" was abused.

It was not until the mid-1990s that a serious review took place, as a result of which the correspondence between George I and Wilhelm IV was completely edited for the first time. This reappraisal holds back with interpretations of the case and is largely limited to the facts that result directly from the correspondence and research regarding George I and the persecution of witches.

The fact that Wolf could have believed his statements himself is not completely ruled out, while Anne is suspected to be a lover whom she wanted to protect with her confession.

A more recent treatise, on the other hand, sees a true core in the confessions, which is symbolized behind folk myths. It points to similarities in Wolf's relationship to his "Teufel Fedderwisch" and the relationship to Konrad Ballaß, the alleged murderer of his sister's husband. For Anne, on the other hand, an arranged forced marriage (which was forbidden according to Georg's agenda) with an influential personality is assumed here. The sudden increased political influence of a Dreieicher family in Darmstadt in the early 17th century and some details in Anne's confession serve as an indication.

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Müller, The condemnation of an Arheilger witch in 1586, in: Hessische Chronik, 4th year, 1915
  2. ^ Winfried Noack, Georg I of Hesse and the Upper County of Katzenelnbogen (1567–1596), Darmstadt 1966
  3. ^ Max Peter Maass, witch hunter. From the maleficent files of the Hessian State Archives Darmstadt, in: Darmstädter Tagblatt, 32 episodes from November 30, 1967-15. August 1968 and Ernst Schneider, Das Halsgericht zu Groß-Gerau, in: Heimatspiegel, sheets for the care of local history and homeland love in the Gerauer Land, series XII and XIII., July 13th and 20th, 1968
  4. ↑ Ernst Schneider, Das Halsgericht zu Groß-Gerau, in: Heimatspiegel, sheets for the care of local history and homeland love in the Gerauer Land, part XII, July 13, 1968
  5. ↑ Thomas Lange / Jürgen Rainer Wolf: The persecution of witches in Hessen-Darmstadt at the time of George I, in: Archive for Hessian History and Antiquity, New Volume 52nd Volume 1994
  6. ^ Hexenwahn in Darmstadt ( Memento from August 24, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Hexenwahn in Darmstadt
  7. ^ Agenda (Marburg 1574), reprint Darmstadt 1662; STAD J 487/18, also: http://www.digada.de/reformation/uebersichtreformation.htm
personal data
SURNAME Weber, Wolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Victims of the Darmstadt witch persecution
DATE OF BIRTH around 1572
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: August 29, 1582
Place of death Darmstadt